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TNW Picks: Chrome extensions we love

We saw that over at Quora there was a thread with the Chrome extensions they found most useful. No doubt that a lot of those extensions are great, but we thought that there were a bunch of great extensions missing. And not just the TNW Chrome extension, but lots of others ones that we TNW folks rely on all the time …

Here’s the interesting thing about our list (and our favs), as we had this discussion in the TNW backchannel, we all realized that we often go through our Chrome extensions and cull out the ones we aren’t using.

Oh sure, some are worse than others and only one or two extensions probably won’t cause any noticeable degradation in Chrome (or other browsers), but one of the realizations we’ve had over time is that lean and mean is faster.

So, given the fact that lean and mean can make for better browsing … what are my “must have” Chrome extensions? I’m talking about I need these to get my job done.

Number one: 1Password. I need that one more than any other and I’d say an hour doesn’t go by when I don’t use it. It’s how I manage all the passwords I have on various sites. Considering 95% of my passwords are randomly generated, I can’t remember them. Only 5-6 passwords are ones that I know, those are just keys to others.

After that I’d make sure that I have Xmarks installed (especially now that I’ve been playing with tab syncing). I might stay in Chrome most of the time, but now and then I need all my bookmarks in Safari or (gasp) Firefox or (the horror) IE.

The last would probably be the two RSS extensions to subscribe to RSS feeds and (when I use Google Reader) to let me open tabs in the background as I read. I hate having a tab pop up forcing me to click back on GR.